Elton John: The Little Hooker That Could

There is something wondrous about Elton John, and something
monstrous. The preeminent rock star of the '70s seems out of time,
untouched by the decade's confusion. Unlike most of his compeers, he
consumes music omnivorously--his tastes suggest fuel rather than
food--and he pursues this fame with such single-minded compulsion that
to accuse him of escapism sounds silly, like accusing a runaway
freight train of antisocial tendencies.

Always the metaphore that arise are mechanical. As the great
inheritor of Philadelphia pop-rock, in which rock and roll ceases to
be an uncontrolled natural force and turns into a product understood
and exploitable, John's records are artifacts rather than expressions
of a palpably vital individual. Of course, they share this artifactual
quality with some of the best popular music of our time--the
exquisitely crafted recordings of Randy Newman or Paul Simon or Steely
Dan, or of the current kings of Philadelphia soul, Gamble and
Huff. But with such artists the metaphors are from nature--what they
create is like a fly preserved in amber. What Elton John creates is
more like a Coca-Cola sign.

Not counting a soundtrack and a live album and a greatest hits and
a collection of early efforts as yet unreleased here, John's newest
LP, Rock of the Westies--number one, of course, containing one
number-one single so far--is the ninth album (including one double)
the singer-songwriter has loosed upon the American public since the
time of his debut at the Troubadour in Los Angeles in August, 1970. By
the standards established for today's pop, such productivity is gross,
proof in itself that Elton must be doing something wrong, and the
alacrity with which he works is equally suspect. The songs begin with
lyricist Bernie Taupin, whom Elton met in 1967 by answering a want ad;
although the two once spent a lot of time scuffling and still tour
together, they rarely see each other socially any more. Taupin will
write the lyrics for an album over a two-week flurry, spending perhaps
an hour on each one, and send them on to Elton, who works out chords
and melody for each lyric unchanged, a process that usually takes less
than an hour. Recording takes a few weeks at most. John has said he
believes pop music should be disposable; the way he grinds it out, he
might pass for a garbage processing plant.

Yet there are few people who like rock and roll, or any pop music,
who remain unreached by Elton John. It's not just that he's so
pervasive, although that helps; quite simply, the man is a genius. No
matter how you deplore his sloppiness, or his one-dimensionality, or
his $40,000 worth of rose-colored glasses, you will find yourself
humming "Take Me to the Pilot" or "Bennie and the Jets" or "Don't Let
the Sun Go Down on Me." Not all of them, perhaps; maybe not any of
those three. But the man's gift for the hook--made up whole or
assembled from outside sources--is so universal that there is small
statistical likelihood that one of them hasn't stuck in your pleasure
center. Or your craw. Or both.

For of course a good hook does not guarantee aesthetic merit--it is
merely a means to aesthetic merit, and far from a foolproof one. The
chorus of "Take Me to the Pilot" is as compelling a melody as John has
ever concocted, but the lyric is gibberish, and every time the melody
leads me to the gibberish I resent it more. Or again: John's affected
pronunciation of discard ("disz-gard") is a kind of hook in itself,
and also a turn-off in itself. In "Bennie and the Jets," on the other
hand, the way some fairly standard notions about rock stardom are
embodied in the music--the whole damn song is one enormous hook--makes
them vivid and convincing.

Hooks are integral to hit singles; they are what makes disc jockeys
and radio listeners remember a record. The heedless fecundity of
John's recording habits tends to produce hit singles; one cut or
another is bound to be right because it's all so hit-or-miss. So when
John is praised critically, it is usually as a singles
artist. Inevitably, though, some of John's monster singles present him
at his most monstrous--not so many any more, granted, but you can't
just disregard (or diszard) those that do. His Greatest Hits is
a hodgepodge. But there is a compensation--John processes so much music
that it is possible to sort out the garbage on that jumble of
long-playing discs by analyzing their hook content.

On his two worst albums, Madman Across the Water and
Please Don't Shoot the Piano Player, hooks are both rare and
dull; the same goes for at least half of the double-LP, Goodbye
Yellow Brick Road, and the second side of Caribou. On the
two early song-poetry efforts, Elton John and Tumbleweed
Connection, the hooks are often there, but the way they drip with
nasal sensitivity (wiped by Paul Buckmaster's orchestral embroidery)
you wish they weren't. A similar sensibility reemerges in a less
fulsome musical context on Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt
Cowboy, the autobiographical bildungselpee of earlier this year,
but the concept fails, and its failure as a whole diminishes its
better parts.

That's already six and a half discs gone, but what's left is at
least five years worth of good rock and roll. Honky Chateau,
album number four, which announced John's and Taupin's escape from the
excesses of their own romanticism, sounds even crisper today, when you
can be sure it wasn't a fluke. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
(number six) is uneven but goes places, including not only "Bennie and
the Jets" and one of John's two hit Rolling Stone rip-offs, "Saturday
Night's Alright for Fighting," but also the unheralded "Your Sister
Can't Twist." This raver is one of John's masterpieces, overlaying
surf-sound harmonies and midway organ on an intensified send-up of
Danny & the Juniors' "At the Hop," itself the most intense
Philadelphia pop-rock record ever made. The first, side of
Caribou (number seven) leads off with an even nastier Rolling
Stones rip-off, "The Bitch Is Back," and never lets up. My favorite
cut is called "Solar Prestige a Gammon": "Solar prestige a gammon/Kool
kar kyrie kay salmon/Hair ring molassis abounding/Common lap kitch
sardin a poor floundin."

Which brings us to Rock of the Westies, which I didn't like
when I first put it on and now think is Elton John's best album. This
is nothing new. Despite his considerable commercial skill and fabulous
commercial success, John does not suit my (rather permissive) notions
about how an artist should behave, and although (or perhaps because)
he is five years younger than me, he is not a child of the '60s the
way I am. He threatens me, and like most people I know I tend to fear
and distrust him, so I write him off all the time. On this record I
took a blas? approach, comparing him to the Bic pen, a formerly
dependable product which can no longer be counted on to write every
time.

Then, in a bad mood one night, I lay down and read the lyrics along
with the music. I grew angry. Not that the lyrics were bad in
themselves; in fact, they were Taupin's best batch ever, maybe a real
goodbye to the yellow brick road. Taupin had written about race and
class before, but not with this sort of toughness and clarity and
irony; there was even a contribution from a woman, backup singer Ann
Orson, about the contradictions of working-class marriage, the first
outside composition ever to appear on an Elton John album. But the
music . . . arghh, the music. This Bic was not only writing, it was
leaking on my shirt; between the band's machine-tooled hard rock and
Elton's automatic good cheer, it was crossing the fucking words right
out.

The next day, you guessed it, I found myself singing not one but
three or four of the tunes--the "Take Me to the Pilot" effect, in a
way, although rather than leading me to gibberish the music was, in
effect, the gibberish itself. I'll shake this off, I said to myself,
but I could not resist playing the record again . . . and again. Both
sides. Hooked again.

Only one of the nine songs on the album bothers me much any more,
and even that one I'm not sure about. The title is "Billy Bones and
the White Bird," with lyrics that more or less match, and the hook is
the only one I noticed before reading the words--Elton chanting "check
it out" over an echo-ish Bo Diddley shuffle, very
contemporary-sounding, and therefore irrelevant to the old-salt spirit
of the lyric as I understand it. With Taupin, that last is an
essential proviso--half the time he does not bother to make himself
understood, which given the middlebrow claptrap he is capable of when
he does ("Hollywood made you a superstar/And pain was the price you
paid") often seems a blessing--but what made this album different was
that it applied in a new way. The difference was irony--the lyrics were
clear to begin with, but shifted nuance over repeated listenings. And
as I listened I found their toughness and clarity and irony enriched
by the music and by John's abiding high spirits.

"Grow Some Funk of Your Own," is the greatest in a long line of
south-of-the-border songs that began with the Robins' "Down in
Mexico," because the nastiness of the slumming impulse underlying such
tales is implicit in the marimba accent of the band's own funk and the
Spanish accent John assumes when quoting the avenging boyfriend ("he
was so macho," Elton whimpers). The faked-up Caribbean inflections,
both oral and instrumental, of the hit single, "Island Girl," imply a
naive racism belied by the impassive but sage cruelty of the lyric's
conclusion--that is, the "inappropriateness" of the music ultimately
elaborates the song's irony. In contrast the temper of both "Street
Kids" and Ann Orson's "Hard Luck Story," fired by the band's drive,
cuts through John's arbitrary ebullience, giving us a glimpse of its
works that only does the songs credit. And on "I Feel a Like a Bullet"
Taupin finally justifies his penchant for mixed metaphor by providing
Elton with an alibi: "You know I can't think straight no more." Some
variation on that line would have improved a lot of their songs.

None of this analysis is meant to imply vision or intent. John and
Taupin are such good partners because they share, over and above their
commercial energy and a certain generalized ripe sentimentality, a
blankness of artistic personality. Although it is only Taupin's lyrics
that can elevate John's music to anything more than the most trivial
aural diversion, John seems as indifferent to their quality as Taupin
himself does to what they contain.

Don't get me wrong--Taupin can be an excellent lyricist, and it's a
very good thing that he writes for John. Captain Fantastic
excepted (and even that had its share of moments), his relative
anonymity has saved his superstar mouthpiece from the onanistic
banality of superstar lyrics; because he can walk the streets like a
real person, it's no strain for Taupin to write songs that are
actually about things. But Taupin's wide-ranging historical and
cultural subject matter, added to the old romantic staples, serves
only to redefine the meaning of commercial songwriting in this time;
he treats the various social issues with no discernible commitment or
consistency. For all we can tell, they might as well be
moon-June-spoon.

And this, how-you-say, impartiality is perfectly suited to
John's singing, which is not interpretive in any ordinary sense of the
term. The man has a ballad voice, which is adenoidal and
sensitive-sounding, and a hard rock voice, which is adenoidal and
insensitive-sounding, and he can simulate a few surface effects, like
the accents which adorn this album. In its way, his style is quite
distinctive--that is his vocal timbre is unmistakable--but it is
indubitably mechanical. Its automatism is best demonstrated by that
song I quoted from Caribou, "Solar Prestige a Gammon," which is
written entirely in words that only sound like words or that can't
possibly mean what they seem to mean. Needless to say, John sings it
with all his usual cheery conviction, which I assume is his way of
telling us something.

If you like, what it tells us is monstrous. Such arrogance. That
mindless cipher makes untold millions a year; that pudgy robot is a
hero and an object of fantasy sex. But to say that Elton John lacks
the lineaments of a conventional artist is not to say he is a cipher;
to say that his singing is mechanical is not to declare him a
robot. He is a star because people love his music and are immensely
attracted to his immense vivacity. The best way to explain him is to
steal an idea from Greil Marcus: Elton is the superfan, the ultimate
music consumer. This is literally true--his collection of popular
records is almost certainly one of the largest in the world, and he
seems to listen to all of them. Who knows how much of his listening he
puts to use? The most remarkable proof is on this record, which
involves his first major personnel switch since the departure of Paul
Buckmaster: a half-new Elton John Band. There is a tendency to forget
Elton's musicians; since he is a machine, it can't matter who backs
him. But that was a good band, and it does make a difference, because
these guys kick more ass than the old guys. An especially useful
addition is a second keyboard man, James Newton Howard, whom Elton
found on an all-instrumental solo LP released awhile back on Kama
Sutra. I played that record when it came through and dismissed it, but
Elton heard something there. That is the superfan's reward.

And finally, the superfan's reward is the fans' reward. Elton is
our tabula rasa--the very sureness of his instinct for sales make him
a kind of one-man Zeitgeist. If he can be maudlin or stupid or
hedonistic or self-indulgent--the new album is very tight until the
song endings, which tend to repeat the same riff ad tedium--so we can
we, and those of us who reject those flaws in ourselves will reject
them in him as well. But if he can produce incisive music without even
willing it, as seems possible, well, perhaps there is more room for
optimism there than in the strivings of a lonely artist. Maybe, in
fact, Elton John isn't out of time at all. Maybe he is one small
indication that some things about the times are already aright.